I actually got to Officeworks to print the thing out because the examiners needed a paper copy to read. I got two copies because they wanted two. With plastic ring binding. And as I’m paying for it and having a quick flip through to see how it looks I see some comments in the margin of the first page that weren’t deleted and I inwardly groan. It was just that one bit on the acknowledgements page. It’s the first time I’ve used those track changes and comment functions so I didn’t know they’d stay visible after printing.

I dreamt about it a night or two later. There was disparaging comments in red written by some unseen examiner. What ever happens there’s 20 000 more words been added to the universe on Grunge. I don’t know what the legal implications would be of me adding it to the archives here. I’m sure I can but it’s the kind of thing you never see people doing. The enrichment of society and intellectual property seem to be at opposite ends of something.

The house is turning out okay. Always a bit hard getting used to a new place. And there’s always things that I never notice when first house hunting but then find out about once all the boxes go down.

There’s heaps more room but I’m really going to try and not fill it up with junk. Every move I do I see there’s all this stuff I’m carrying around that I never use. All these books I never look at.

I didn’t realise it but the amenities at the last place were pretty modern. Here, they were installed in a time when resources were cheaper and flowed freely. That gas heater has a pilot light which is burning all the time. I don’t know if that’s right. As in, I don’t know if it can be turned off. I will have to find out. There is a meal-hole in the wall between the kitchen and lounge-room because back then there were kitchen people and lounge-room people. Also, not pictured, is the toilet which is in lovely Degobah swamp shaded of green and the cistern is huge. I don’t know how many litres it takes to fill but it seems to take a long time.

The car. The car is boring but sensible. When the time comes, its resale value will be better than if I had chosen an quirky or interesting car. Silver is the new beige, or the new banana yellow. I still don’t have my full license so for a while it will just sit there. I’m sure we’ll start to have fun with it once I can drive it.

I’m doubtful that anyone else noticed but for over 24hours in the last day or so the sunny breaks was DOWN. I get twitchy when I can’t view this website and see that nothing’s going on on it. And I guess the usual server wizard who sorts these things out is on holiday because I didn’t hear from anyone. In any case, all now is well and crisis: averted.

Less than five days til the dissertation deadline. Still a bunch to do but it’s not too bad. You know, I’m 39 so to the kids, pretty old but I feel like every new weakness or addiction that pops up in newer generations I also get. Like internet addiction, and short attention span. I’ve been wanting to ask my supervisor, who also teaches 18yo freshie BA students, whether they even get those things—I bet they don’t—I bet it’s just me.
When I was a kid I had this chess computer thing. It was like a normal physical chess board but with LEDs on the side. When you moved a piece you’d press down on the spot first then press down on the square you moved to so the computer would know what was going on. Then it’d make it’s move and the lights would come up showing you where it moved to. There was about eight ‘computer brain’ settings that supposedly varied the difficulty of its game. Level one it’d make its move after a couple of seconds and level eight it’d take 10 minutes to decide its move. But the thing was it’d make the same decision no matter what level it was set to.
I feel like that’s what my brain is like—except it’s stuck on the 10 min. setting. It’s takes me 10 minutes to write one dame sentence.

Here is an additional of my biggest sunflower. I should’ve put my fist in front of it for reference. It’s monsterously huge. At this stage I really like vege gardening – there’s a point to it, and I like flower gardening if they can be exciting like this – like from Land of the Giants or they eat bugs or something. Most of the other sunflowers have died out and dried, producing sunflower seeds which are incredibly edible. But this one has a tomato growing in tandem right underneath it so it’s still getting watered, thus it’s still green and the head won’t dry out by the time it’s time to leave. Our one year in this little place is up and we’re moving into slightly larger digs which should be good. It’s just a shame about the few plants I’ll have to basically just rip out and kill because everything must return to normal for the nazi landord and stormtrooper real estate agents.

Still bashing away at the finishing touches of the dissertation. Writing long things is hard. Like building long bridges is hard. Both have a tendency to sag in the middle if you don’t know what you’re doing. Anyway, I was just searching for the “guitar as an element of style” (which is a damn interesting topic all by itself, on which I’d love nothing more than to spout-off about it here, right now, in an unreferenced fashion—but that’s procrastinating). And thought I’d come across an article on a blog that seemed to fit the bill perfectly but upon closer inspection I see that it’s one of those robot-blogs advertising products. It’s a big universe: achieve peace through superior firepower today.

Finally. And god I hope that’s the end. I hope it doesn’t get sent back with the note, please do this, this and this. It’s mediocre for sure but hopefully the prof will quietly let it through as long as we promise never to speak of it again. I don’t know if I complained about it on here before, but I just don’t know if teenage-minded me and the real teenagers for real are built to complete things that take that long to finish. It’s ADHD I tell you. It’s the internet. It takes supreme will power to read anything longer than 4000 words, let alone write it. They (“THEY”) really should think about changing the way dissertations are done.

There’s been a steady decline in the interestingness of this blog in the last two or three years. I feel like all I ever talk about is what I’ve been watching/listening to or other pop. culture things. Also, my writing style has become more pompous. Today is the beginning of the long walk back from boring.

First, I’m thinking of moving SBs onto a different webhost because I am starting to feel I have out-worn my welcome at hostcentral. It’s hard to say but the only thing I hear from them these days is the robots saying I’m using too much space. The place where I’m thinking of moving to offers a free domain name upon registration, and since I already have one, sunnybreaks.org, there’s the poss. of another. I used to have theredshoes.net, and the intention was I would take photos of anyone I saw wearing red shoes and put them on there, but it never happened.

Choosing a domain always blows my mind because there’s so many. But common ones are all gone, for eg. thebigcheese.com—good, but gone. However, while telling me it’s unavailable, computer suggests to me, “freethebigcheese.com” or “thebigcheesegroup.net”. This kind of stuff gets me my jollies.

I just found out this morning that the finishing date for my dissertation – desert-tayshun- is going to have to be pushed back to late Jan. Partly because a lot of what I wrote was garbage, but that’s because I was getting no supervision. Left to my own devices I start waffling like a crazy granma. The damn supervisor was sick but neglected to let me know until 3 weeks before the due date. Man… frustrating.

* * *

I was thinking, the whole MTV Unplugged thing. It’s like THE MAN pulling that trick where parents in a car say to kids, “let’s play Who can be silent for the longest”. Trick bands who usually rock out into playing quiet.

* * *

I’m still really loving some of the images that people mash and put together and throw up onto the web. The ubiquitous house cat of course, amazing in its expressiveness.

This is great, but maybe a bit spoiled by the demotivator style titling.

And ‘asshole Jesus’ really makes me lol. I have to go back so far on the Grunge dissertation I wish I could scrap it and start again on something interesting like narrative in GTA IV, or the semiotics of 4chan/b.

Man I should really be writing about Grunge but it’s hard to concentrate. I’m seriously thinking about writing to the uni and proposing that they start to transition the system for the next generation of permanently ADDed slackers, of which I seem to be part of. I was sick of this thesis topic before I’d even started tapping the keyboard. I’ve probably written it here before but I’d much rather have done four or five 4-5ooo word topics.

* * *

Car chase movies: the original Gone In 60 Seconds was the next one I could find. Interesting in that it’s another bit of what life was like in my birth year (1974) and unusual in that it was classified as an independent film. It was the brain child of one guy – most of the cars used in it belonged to him, and he got his friends to do the “acting” in it. There weren’t any professional actors. There’s a whopping 34 minute car chase in the finale, which helps it to blend in with much higher-budgeted films of its time. When looking at the directing of the dialogue and actors I was just thinking, ah that’s the 70s for ya.

The best bit about it was the wigs, sunglasses and suits. In fact I think, in some small way, one of my fav video clips, Beastie Boys’ Sabotage is ahhhn ohmaaage to it.

From the movie, this is H.B. Halicki, writer, producer, director and main actor:

Apparently, the wigs were to fool the cops. I think he just had a funky wig fetish.

Here is the token black guy in the car-stealing team, and a young lady dressed in a rather racy 70s way.

There was a caddy full of homies cruising around that was kinda cool too.

I could say I’ve been beavering away at my master dissertation but I haven’t really. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and how I’m not concentrating on it as much as I would like to. I just contacted ze supervisor and confirmed what I was hoping, which is that the halfway point is kind of flexible so all is well.

I have been continuing to work my way through grand theft auto 4. There’s not much that can be said about that. It’s a kind of a singular journey. When I am talking to people on the phone recently I realise I don’t have that much to say, in part due to the fact that I have been playing the gta4, and it would be easy to conclude that this is making me a more boring person, but then what would have I been doing and saying if I had not started the game? “Hot tub time machine was funny/boring/depressing”, or “How about that new iPhone!”. In the end I think it makes little difference.

* * *

I’m on a B&W kick.

It’s funny how with normal settings I wouldn’t think of possibly intruding on people’s supposed privacy with my camera but when I think, ah stick it on black n white, it’s arty, look at the everyday life of the bus-waiters watching free TV in the mild, pre-wall of humidity summer.

I just discovered that if I unplug the router in the morning I get a heck of a lot more study down. T’is a good feeling. Randoms:

I think I saw this movie, The Krays about 20 years ago. I just watched it again. It’s not bad, but if I had a time machine I’d probably go back and try to convince the principles, Gary and Martin Kemp, to not do it because it was the end of Spandau Ballet, and they made great songs, like ‘True’. That song will be around forever, but the film is already buried.

Then I’d go back to the late 1920s and convince Hitler to pursue a career in writing books for children and young adults.

* * *

Also, I find this insanely gorgeous. It’s like a muppets skit, but real. The perfect synthesis of Man, (human) feline and internet. This is the kind of thing that’s put me 4 weeks behind schedule with the study, and will undoubtedly conquer vastly superior races across the galaxy.

These are sad times because my plants are dying. I entrusted them with a coworker during my time away. I’d had them four years or more. The chances of them reviving are about the same as that of some dude splitting a sea in two.

I’ve been watching 1950s epics with charleton Heston in them. Ben Hur was pretty cool. Must have had a huge budget for it’s time. I liked how it had the alternate viewpoint of history angle going, at least in the first part. It would’ve been better if they’d just had that bit where jesus is giving charleton some water, but then not crossed paths with the biblical stuff again. There was some good bits of scoring in the soundtrack too. Also pretty cool that Frank Thring got to be Pilate.

A little more cheesy was The Ten Commandments. This is probably the most memorable scene:

But I liked the bit where charleton had just come back down from talking with the burning bush.

Joshua: Whoa Moses, nice blow wave. Who did?

Moses: The Hand of God held the hair dryer that blew this wave.

Sephora: Sage.

* * *

I’m trying to start my masters thesis. I don’t know where the apostrophe should go there. And I don’t know where to start. 20,000 words is a lot.

That’s right my friends, sunny breaks is back on track, ready to get those big wheels rollin, rollin rollin on the river.

I finished my study for the year last Friday afternoon. It wasn’t a particularly auspicious ending – in fact I’ll be damn lucky if I pass that exam I wrote. But everything else has been so terribly backlogged this last three months that it’s hard not to celebrate. Celebrate by cleaning the bath, by trynna find a new job, by passing a kidney stone.

I can’t confirm that that’s what happened but I’m pretty sure. All week I was feeling a little funny and then last night it came to a head when I suffererd these intense pains in my right-back kidney. I didn’t think I was going to die, but I did think I was headed for the hospital er room—11pm. But just as I’d admitted the pain was too much for me, it ceased. But not before I completely heaved my guts.

I used to be so good a vomiting. I would be able to get it all in the bowl – but while not as long as the last winning streak (9 years) this one, (2.5 years) was still quite a while between rides on the porcelain night train. It was quick. It was violent. It was thorough. I burst a blood vessel in my left eyelid.